Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/46

 (fronting the title-page of Lewis's Life of Wyclif) "by James Eittler, from a drawing by W. Skelton, taken from a picture in the possession of the Earl of Denbigh." A copy of the portrait hangs in Lutterworth Rectory, and another (by Kingsby?) in the hall of Balliol College, Oxford. In this, as in the Dorset picture, the right hand holds a staff; but the left hand rests upon a book, the face turns to its right, and the beard is not divided.

A strangely characteristic portrait is preserved in Queen's College, Cambridge,—a half-length, face turned slightly to the left, age about fifty or fifty-five, vigorous and somewhat aggressive in attitude. It approaches more nearly to the type of Bale's woodcut than to that of the three portraits last mentioned. A mezzotint engraving in an oval frame was prepared by Richard Houston for Rolt's Lives of the Reformers, 1759, with the following inscription: "Johannes Wickliffe. Obijt A: 1384. A Tabula in Coll. Reg. Cantab." One could almost imagine the "regius clericus" in his full strength and dignity, just about the time when John of Gaunt was coming to close grips with the wealthy English prelates, coolly shaping his lips to whistle away the first angry criticisms of the friars.

In the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum there are a few cognate engravings, of which the best and the original is that of H. Hondius, reproduced in the present volume. This print bears the inscription: "Ioannes Wiclefus Anglus," and is entered in Bromley's Catalogue with the date 1599. It is in fact one of the series included in